Well, in the extreme you could have a single NIC port on the router and use VLANs and a managed switch to multiplex WAN and LAN traffic over this single port. This is possible and a number of all in one routers actually do this; it also seems sub-optimal, so I wanted to emphasize that a router should have >= 2 ports. Which seems on-topic to me.
Again i have absolutely no idea what you're talking about because people use cards instead of a switch to reduce buffer and CPU load with hardware and network FIFO offloading on the network card itself.
On a switch, LAN to LAN traffic does not even register with the main CPU at all (so zero CPU cycles), with dedicated NICs you would need direct DMA from one NIC to another NIC's memory to avoid processing by the CPU. And even if direct DMA is used to avoid the CPU then this is still going to eat into the available memory bandwidth and might have side effects the CPU can experience.
Also what is "network FIFO offloading"?
Could you please elaborate what the linked post is demonstrating in your opinion?
Searching there for either buffer, offload, or FIFO comes out empty. (Note that around minute 4:40 the builder tells the audience that he will place the device in top of his network switch, so this seems more an example of both, multiple ports on the "router" and dedicated L2 switching, pretty much what I described, no?).
So in your opinion you prefer a switch , i on the other hand don't have an opinion as i have never built a router!
I was just bringing up the subject for consideration for those that have posted in this thread an interest in building their own router as something they may wish to explore for the pros and cons.
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There is a lot of noise going around on Realtek NICs. Yes, in the past (years ago) there were issues with performance and poor drivers. But those issues have been solved long time ago. Currently I have a Odroid H2 as a router with OPNsense and there are no (performance) issues / limitations at all. If this is still an issue in OpenWrt the drivers should be updated.
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They're still quite unreliable and have some fun quirks, you can look the driver source code for FreeBSD 
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I am running OpenWRT as an ESXI appliance. Hardware is a Intel G4560 on a Mitac PH12SI (Q170 chipset) which has double Intel NIC. CPU utilization (mostly softirq) is about 5% when fully utilizing my 100/40 VDSL connection using PPP and piece of cake sqm. That should be able to utilize gigabit WAN. As the mainboard has a DC plug, I just use a high efficiency notebook power supply. System uses about 7 w in idle and 25w when topping the CPU.
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Got the ODRIOD H2 booting master plus UEFI patches -- Media not bootable in BIOS - x86_64 - ODROID H2 - #2 by slh
I'm seeing 900 Mbps plus in initial testing, close to twice that with multiple upstream and downstream TCP. I'll follow up with more results once I've got the SQM runs done. They take a while to run to cover for just routing/NAT then adding in WireGuard or OpenVPN.
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I dont know if im doing something wrong then or have something misconfigured, my wan speeds wont break 100mbit (~220 mbit expected), on trunk builds, 18.06 builds work as expected, this is not on an h2 although
I rolled my own build instead of buildbots and it seemed to 'fix' the 100mbit 'cap'
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I have been tempting myself for a while on the odroid h2, according to your opinion, that you recommend me to run it with openwrt
Gratitude
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Post on a new thread if you need help building a UEFI-compatible image. The pull request (PR) seems stalled by the core devs.
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Thanks for the reply
I'm already building the image to prove it, but what I wanted was to know your personal opinion about the Odroid H2 with openwrt
Gratitude
Solid on the bench. Will shortly be taking over some server duties on FreeBSD.
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is 1gig line so much cpu power demanding or soho routers have so poor cpu's? seriously? over 10 years atom d525 can nat + firewall 930mbps with as low as 20% sirq. i3 2320 do it with circa 6% sirq. sqm @ 1gig? realy don't see the point for this level of speed. it looks like we are force to buy overpriced stuff with magic tricks like nss/ other nat hw/sw boosters or aes crypto engines for ssl acceleration where today openvpn is still singlethread and wireguard outperform it like 6-10 times...
And nobody forces you to use it (at any speed, it is a policy issue each network administrator needs to make for the own network and use-cases). But just because a link is reasonably fast, does not mean it is without bufferbloat... And especially cake offers a few more nice things, like the different fairness/isolation modes that still might make sense at 1 Gbps links... but again these do not automatically make sense for anybody...
With Call of Duty putting out a 54.2GB patch that'll still monopolize the 1Gbps connection for 10 minutes. It would be nice if during that time others in the household could still use Zoom, Stadia, etc at low latency.
I'd certainly rather have less bandwidth and SQM that stays performant than killer 1Gbps bandwidth that gets laggy anytime somebody is able to take advantage of it.
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At 1Gbps there isn't as much of an impedance mismatch between the WAN and the LAN. Most people are going to have 1Gb LAN, switches etc.
In my opinion, it's possible to get reasonable low latency performance using DSCP and relatively simple QoS available build into moderate quality switches. Things like the ZyXel SG1900 series.
Typically these use WRR queuing. If you can force bulk transfers to use say CS1 and things like Zoom and Jitsi and Facetime etc to use say CS6, with the appropriate WRR weights, you'll do fine.
That's simply not true when your LAN is 1Gb and the WAN is say 50Mbps
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Hi,
My 5c worth:
For pure bang-for-buck 500-1000Mbps-ish connection just doing NAT (no shaping or OpenVPN), nothing beats overclocked second hand Archer C7. It can costs as low as 40EUR and will route all day long at 900Mbit (using hw ofload) or 300-500-ish using CPU.
But if you want ease of mind and be able to do it all on full 1Gbit connection with room to grow, fanless x86 Atom AES-NI mini PC with two Ethernet ports is your ticket. For as low as 150EUR, it will route,NAT,shape and do all other tricks without breaking a sweat and draw 10-15W. Be advised, WiFi card will cost extra, so will a switch.